Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Social Proxies for Twitter

So my procrastination continues. The latest being to use the twitter API to pull out the relative activity levels of my twitter friends and use it to resize their images. This is all happened after I read Erickson and Kellogg's (2000) paper on Social Translucence.

Using a ruby library (subsequently I found an approach I liked better) I grabbed the last 20 tweets from all my friends and calculated the time between now and each tweet in terms of number of days. Then I inverted that and multiplied by 20, so someone who posted their last 20 tweets all today would get a score close to 1 and the more spaced out their tweets are going back in time, the closer to zero their activity score would be. Above you can see the images of all my twitter friends scaled to their activity score, which gives me an interesting view on who are the most active twitterers in my friends over the last week or so.